College Football Hall of Fame to be gone by December

By December, 2012, the National Football Foundation will padlock the doors of the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend.

Adios. Arrivederci. Bon voyage. See ya.

Saturday night’s 18th enshrinement gala was the finale of a lame weekend in the hall’s lame-duck year.

The cornerstone of the 2012 class, Deion Sanders, bailed. The parade went poof. Fan Fest was fumbled away.

The closest the public had to a glimpse of the football heroes was watching them try on their blazers Friday night.

Ribs, music and cornhole made the block party worth attending.

Oh well. This is business. Big-boy business.

Steve Hatchell, NFF president and CEO since 2005, had an idea this was coming. The Hall of Fame’s governing body served notice in 2009 thatit planned on relocating to Atlanta.

“We’re going to go from very good to better,” Hatchell said Saturday.

Present Hall of Fame staffing is somewhere between temp and bare bones. Lots of interns. Trying to somehow get through the weekend was the only goal.

Hatchell said construction in Atlanta is slated to begin in about two months. Target date for completion is sometime around September, 2014.

In the meantime, know of a good storage unit?

Besides one really big empty storefront, the city of South Bend will be left with a $6.4 million debt on the building.

From the get-go, critics of the hall fostered an adversarial relationship between the city and the NFF.

Money matters created a tense environment.

Sponsorship dough? Tax burden? Private cash?

The lifeblood of any museum is a constantly fresh approach. Give the customer a reason to come back, right? The College Football Hall of Fame got bogged down by bills and lost sight of the big picture.

“By the time I got here, (museum displays) had been static,” Hatchell said. “The only thing that would ever come up was ‘Here’s a way to get money from someone else to make this work.’

“The conversation was never around, ‘How do we make it better?’ It wasalways, ‘How do we pay the expenses to keep the lights on?’”

Hatchell lauded former South Bend mayor Steve Leucke as being “classy”and “having a vision.”

All in all, though, it was never a good marriage.

“I think there were issues,” Hatchell said. “I guess it was just that you didn’t really feel welcome.”

Hard for the city to even afford a welcome mat after the money that was already being siphoned off.

Could have been different. The one entity that never entered into the equation was the game itself. Why shouldn’t college football support its own Hall of Fame?

All it takes is $1. Have each school that has a football program — more than 700 at every level — designate one game as its “Hall of Fame Game.” Take $1 from every ticket sold that day and send the check to the hall.

Notre Dame would send $80,000. Michigan, more than $100,000. And on, and on.

Heck, there would be a surplus after one year.

All for $1.

“It could (work), if you had started it out that way,” Hatchell said. “If you would have said to the (college football) community around the country, ‘We’re going to build this, it’s yours, we need your support to make it work.’”

Hatchell felt that sort of arrangement would have opened the floodgates for other cities to bid for the hall.

To begin it mid-stream in the hall’s operation, “would have been very hard to do,” Hatchell said.

Instead, it’s done. Finish out the year. Maybe. Somehow.

Then, back up the trucks.

“There’s a great sense of sadness and disappointment,” Hatchell said.

The NFF thinks it has an upgrade. The city’s left with a hollow shell that still needs plumbing and other work.